There's A Reason No One Listens To Older People

August 30, 1986|By Bob August, Universal Press Syndicate

So much wisdom is dispensed by elderly Chinese that it has sustained a major growth industry. Fortune cookies are selling like hot cakes.

In China, old people are honored and implored for advice by young men considering marrying or opening a noodle factory. We know this because we've studied Chinese history or seen old Charlie Chan movies in which No. 1 son Keye Luke sought guidance from honorable father Warner Oland, even though his father wore a fedora two sizes too small.

In the United States, we do not honor the elderly or think they are wise. What we suspect is that they're senile. We urge them to push their carts faster in the supermarket and not to take so long writing checks for the groceries.

If you're thinking of volunteering to counsel youth, offering your ripe wisdom, forget it and take up sand painting. Who wants to listen?

Much of this reflects on our society. Some of it reflects on us. Unlike elderly Chinese, we don't seem to be cut out to give great advice.

I've had only two shots at it. Years ago a young man who'd been reared in a foreign country asked me to drop some wisdom on him.

What he asked specifically, tapping my years of worldly experience, was, ''Where should I go to buy a suit?''

He had been to college, where styles favored the bum look, but now he was launching a business career and wanted clothes that didn't look as if they'd been worn in a previous incarnation.

He'd come to the right man. I knew just the store for him.

''The price is moderate, the quality is good and the suits wear forever,'' I said.

The suit he bought didn't wear forever. It lasted three months. Then the arms fell out. In fact, all the stitching broke loose. Now you see clothing ads for men's ''separates.'' He had them back then.

My other experience came years earlier when a young man solicited my advice about entering journalism, which was then, as now, an overcrowded field.

''What I'd suggest,'' I finally said, assuming my magisterial look, ''is that you get into a trade you can count on for life, like being a printer.''

This was, it turned out not many years later, like recommending he become a Viking. Or a distiller of mead. Shortly, a technological revolution arrived, making printers an endangered species.

What I began to see was that I was not gifted in giving advice to the young. Actually, it wasn't the advice but the results that were bad, which for the young people involved was the same thing.

By the way, the young man I'd advised to become a printer did okay. Instead of taking my suggestion, he became a salesman of detergents and cleaned up. It probably proved something.